Brute Orbits (8 page)

And here, his efforts to bring the men together through the shouts hurled back at Earth had also failed. What had he expected? That someone would come out and turn this prison around and take it home? He saw his whole life as a downhill slide—intelligent, yes, but achieving nothing like what the less gifted rebels had managed. He was just not the criminal he imagined himself to be; dumber ones had done better. It could not have been all bad luck. Even though his self criticism told him that he understood the problems and knew how to deal with them, the execution had failed too often. The world would always escape mental models, he told himself, and that was not the fault of reason and planning; that fault lay in the infinite richness of the world-system, and the unusual amount of bad luck that had come his way, for which he refused to take the blame.

So now what was left for him? Daily life and mathematics. He suspected that it might be possible to cancel the shutdown commands and restore communications with the Earth so that news of home might at least trickle in during the decades of life to be endured in the black desert of space, inside this spinning pot of mud and grass.

JUDGE OVERTON’S PRIVATE CHAMBER

“You put people in power over others and they will abuse it. Some will. They did experiments a hundred years ago to prove it, in which people zapped people with electricity just because they could. You can’t have guards in prisons. No guards, no wardens. That’s sitting on a volcano. Guards and correctional officers are only midpoints between civilians and criminals. Some of them have been criminals, like some cops are all their life. There’s no way to get a better class of guards. They only become targets, no matter how good they are. Come to think of it, real progress would be to get a better class of criminals.”

Tasarov found an old portable screen and keyboard in Warden Sanchez’s desk. It couldn’t connect to anything except an old printer, but it would do for what he needed.

Tasarov wrote, “I will set down what I can, so that whatever happens here will not be lost to future judgments. I can only guess at the opinions that will emerge. To write down what I can is the only useful task left to me as our isolation deepens. I may not live to the end of my sentence. I look around at this now silent communications area, and think of the engineering level that encircles the muddy land above me, and wonder how long the automated food systems can produce flavored proteins and fortified vegetable/grain substitutes without maintenance and repair. It might have been better to let us farm at least some of our food in the hollow as a help to our sanity; but they chose not to give us that. If any of these systems fail, we may die. As it is, the medical facilities are quite limited, despite Warden Sanchez’s recorded tips on how to use them. Mostly, we will have to rely on maintaining our health, such as it is for each man.

“Some of the men come to me for advice, but those who seek influence give themselves away by avoiding me. They have already created a currency of exchange by rounding up the more feminine young men to use as female surrogates. The homosexuals among us are not as discriminating; they choose among themselves, and perhaps even love in the truest sense, but are mocked by the professed heteros who trade their chattel. Thirty years will take the bloom off the purely sexual infatuations, but the old lovers may still cling to each other—”

Howes came in and Tasarov stopped writing.

“Can I talk to you?” asked the young man.

“Sit down,” Tasarov said. “What is it?”

Howes leaned forward uncomfortably, put his hands together across his knees, and spoke while looking down at the floor. “Are we so evil that they had to put us out here, Yevgeny?”

Tasarov sat back and said, “This has nothing to do with evil, son. This place is not bad, as prisons go. We don’t have the screws to deal with, for one thing. That’s actually an advance, a way of avoiding day-to-day abuse and cruelties. Takes the temptation away from guards. Better than a rock in the middle of San Francisco Bay, where you could see the city you were missing.”

“Were you there?” Howes asked.

“No—that was in the last century. They closed it as soon as inmates began to show they were brave enough to take it. They didn’t like setting them a challenge they could meet. Complete lockdown high tech prisons came in, and they were nearly escape proof and unbearable, but too costly to operate. They couldn’t put everyone in them, even though they were supposed to be for a very small group—but that group kept getting larger. This place is probably more frightening to people back home than it is to us. Who knows, we’ll swing out and come back in, and maybe we’ll be heroes, maybe. At least to some people.”

Howes sat up and looked at him. “It’s…do you feel empty and abandoned? I don’t think it would feel the same on Earth or on the Moon.”

“We all feel the difference, in one way or another. Something like this has never been done.”

“I feel,” Howes said, “that they think they’re all better than us. Maybe they are.”

Tasarov felt a surge of feeling, a concern for another human being as never before in his life; and yet it seemed to him that Howes was no one special. He didn’t seem to have any distinctive abilities or high intelligence. It was this place, heading out away from everything, that was throwing him into a compassionate state of mind which he could not trust, he told himself.

“They’re not better than us,” Tasarov said, “or we better than them.”

“They’ve taken everything from us,” Howes replied, avoiding his gaze.

“Look, son—any of us here, if we’d come up in their world, or gotten in with the rich and powerful gang families at the top, we would have done the same thing, and sent us out, or people like us. They don’t know what else to do.”

“I don’t get it.”

“We’re all the same. The problem is human beings. Always has been. Top, bottom, or middle, we all behave alike. We’ve pretty much always done so.”

“There are better people, somewhere,” Howes said.

“A few saints here and there, and even they have to work too hard at it. It’s too difficult to sustain. Those who achieve power usually mess it up. Seems there’s no point in raising up the powerless, because you get the same thing.”

“So you don’t blame them for sending us out?”

“I feel as much as you do,” Tasarov said, “but more may come of this than anyone knows.”

“I don’t deserve what’s happened to me,” Howes said.

There was a long silence between them. Then Tasarov asked, “Are they leaving you alone? I mean the others.”

“Funny,” Howes said. “They think I…belong to you.”

“We’re friends,” Tasarov answered quickly. “That much is true. It’s what they’re picking up.”

Howes looked at him. “You don’t feel more?”

Tasarov smiled. “I really do like women—and I’d like one right now. Stand-ins just don’t make it for me, even though I see how the illusion might be had.”

“The illusion?”

Tasarov nodded. “Soft skin, hairlessness, a vulnerable look in the eyes, and in the darkness friction is pretty much the same. It’s also about power—exerting your will on another human being. The genuine homosexuals can have what a man and woman can. The others are getting off on power and illusion. What it means is they’re going to trade people like animals.”

“You won’t tell them, will you?” Howes asked. “I mean, that we’re not…”

“I don’t care what they imagine—and you shouldn’t care either,” Tasarov said. “I don’t care if it helps you.”

“Thanks.”

Tasarov smiled. “As long as you don’t one day expect me to take it seriously.”

Howes looked embarrassed. “Of course not. I just can’t see it.”

The young man was still shaken up about Polau, Tasarov realized. It would have been more humiliating back home, the way Polau had picked and used him.

Tasarov didn’t mind queers, as such; human affections were versatile, and existed on a long spectrum; but the long history of social rejection had deformed this creative human exploration into something furtive and desperately predatory, especially in prisons, where it had become linked to tolerated rape, part of the punishment.

The ancient Greek and Roman acceptance had existed without labels, leaving individuals to find their tendencies. It had always seemed to him that there was for every gay or straight a possible individual somewhere who might arouse and lead them gladly against their grain; and the “next best thing to a woman” philosophy of prison populations certainly made hash of there being any one true path, without exceptions. No one knew what human freedom would find without early training taboos; but it was this very freedom that was feared.

He often felt a romantic fool for thinking it, but he believed with conviction that love beyond mere physicality was possible between any two living creatures in Darwin’s universe, given the right conditions of knowledge and communication. Possible, even if it rarely happened. How much denial and loneliness was necessary before any human being turned to the only available means of expressing love and physical affection? Might not great friends console each other, or even one console the other as with a ministering angel’s mercy, and would the means that might otherwise be repugnant become unimportant?

The answer was yes—sometimes.

Howes stood up and seemed about to speak, then simply nodded and left.

Tasarov smiled to himself, then wrote: “My kind has always sought to rip the devil from its heart and hurl him away. But he stays, no matter how often they cast him out.” It was a consoling thought, and a difficult one, since it involved a knot that first had to be tied correctly—or the problem would not be stated coherently—and then recognized as a knot that should not be untied—and that to cut it might be disastrous.

“We’re not machines or angels,” he wrote. “Worse, we need to be devils, to at least be able to choose wrongly, even if it be evil. Every effort to solve the problem of our capacity to choose evil freely breaks down to some degree, because what is to be solved, human freedom, is not all problem, it is only part of the problem. Freedom to succeed or fail is what should be!”

A series of chance failures had imprisoned him inside this rock.

Think, he told himself, and write it down. It was all that was left to him. And he knew his thinking happiness as he had never known it before—that it was everything.

Boosted into a twenty-five year loop, the second Rock went out a year after the first. Six months later, warfare broke out among the men over the female prisoners, of whom there were an equal number, but not all of equal desirability. The strongest men and women quickly devised weapons, knives and spears, and seized the prime specimens for themselves and as rewards for their followers. A quarter of the males organized to oppose the slavers and liberate the women, and the struggle began. The rest of the population simply tried to keep out of their way.

It had been thought that a male/female prison would be more just, more humane than the all male first Rock; and this might have been the case, except for the effect of John “Jimmy” Barr, a database criminal, who collected and memorized the means needed to steal data and sold that knowledge, priding himself on never having to do any job himself. He had killed two policemen when they came to arrest him. His defense had been that he had been so astonished at being caught selling information, since he believed it to be a statistical impossibility, that he had been driven temporarily insane, and hence was not responsible for the murders. Murder had never been his way. He blamed the police for driving him to it, and had conducted a countersuit even as his trial was beginning.

The Rock to which he had been committed was some seven kilometers long and four wide, with a sealed engineering level. The radio station incident of the first Rock was not to be repeated. The inmates might dig to find the engineering cavities; but this would be long, fruitless work, since they lacked proper tools. Nine hypothetical tries out ten would get them nowhere, and might even be dangerous.

John “Jimmy” Barr decided that he would rule the Rock, and women would be the currency with which he would pay his soldiers. The only other source of power might be in controlling access to the mess hall automats.

He was a tall, dark-haired man with implanted teeth. A loose, lanky physique made it seem he was put together from clothes hangers. He had no inner life, except as a planner of actions that he had never executed. He rarely thought about himself except in practical terms, as if he were someone else; he always looked outward, absorbing what he needed to know, synergizing sequences and tracing out orderly steps to their conclusions. He had been caught only once, and it had been as if he had struck a mirror—glimpsing himself as it shattered.

As Barr considered the battles that had already occurred, he saw that there was only one way to end the war—by seizing the mess hall automats and starving out the opposition. He had the force to do so—but then what?

Suddenly he realized how limited the victory would be: access to the most desirable women, and the ability to order the inmates about. But what could they be ordered to do, except to go about their lives of eating and sleeping, maybe running errands, as they all waited for their time to run out?

But what else was there to do? What could there ever be here? The impoverished landscape had almost nothing to offer except a monastic daily life. The ground itself was the prison wall, and could not be penetrated. All the richness of life on Earth was gone, leaving only a bare stage on which there was only one role—waiting for the play to end.

He would not long be able to control his subjects if he failed to give them something to do. For the moment they were faced with the group that was not under his command, some two thousand people, gathered at the far end of the habitat. He had cut them off from the mess automats, but that would not last long. They sat on the hillsides below the sunplate, waiting to get hungry. When they attacked again, his force would attempt to kill them all—at least those who failed to come over to him after the defeat. All he had to do was wait until they became hungry, while his force ate in shifts.